Zhou Jinshi stood with his back to everyone. His gaze was deep and distant, and no one knew what he was thinking about.
“Captain Zhou, what are you looking at?” After using explosives to blast an open gap between everyone and the zombie horde, Lu Xiaowu ran over.
He was carrying two large backpacks. Raising one of them in front of Zhou Jinshi, he said, “Take a look at this. Does it seem familiar?”
“Fang Qi’s backpack?” Zhou Jinshi withdrew his gaze from the underground and carefully examined the bag before him. He looked not only at the outside but also at the bulging contents inside.
Almost no one in the camp failed to recognize Fang Qi’s hiking backpack. That was why Lu Xiaowu had immediately brought it over to show Zhou Jinshi when he found it.
“Isn’t it Sister Qi’s? Guess where we found it! Under the counter in the hotel’s first floor restaurant. It looked like someone had been hiding there and had even covered themselves with cardboard boxes.” Lu Xiaowu spoke nonstop. Then he paused and lowered his voice to avoid being overheard by Shen Yucheng in the distance. “Do you think Shen Yucheng lied to us? Maybe Sister Qi is actually fine?”
Without asking further questions, Zhou Jinshi turned and headed toward the first floor of the hotel.
The hotel restaurant had gone more than a month without water or electricity due to the apocalyptic disaster. The moment one stepped inside, their brows would instinctively furrow.
The rotten, stale, and putrid smell aggressively assaulted the senses.
Zhou Jinshi carefully inspected the place beneath the counter where the backpack had been found.
Under the beam of the flashlight, several chaotic footprints of varying sizes could be clearly seen on the dust-covered floor.
“This footprint is mine, and this one belongs to Dafeng.” Squatting beside him, Lu Xiaowu pointed them out one by one and asked enthusiastically, “So, can you tell which one belongs to Sister Qi?”
Zhou Jinshi choked and remained silent.
He truly had never paid attention to what shoe size Fang Qi wore, but perhaps he could infer it from her height.
Fang Qi was approximately one meter seventy-three tall. According to the formula, height = (shoe size + 10) / 2 × 7. The size thirty-seven and size forty-three footprints before him clearly did not match Fang Qi.
He slowly shook his head. “It shouldn’t be hers.”
Shen Yucheng’s words had been a mixture of truth and lies, but he would not dare lie about Fang Qi’s and Zhao Siyuan’s deaths.
Those two were far stronger than Shen Yucheng. If there had been even a one percent chance that they survived, they would have returned to the camp, and Shen Yucheng’s lies would have been exposed very easily.
Shen Yucheng liked Chen Mi, so it was impossible for him to lie about matters involving her.
The only variable was Su Zhihai.
But since Su Zhihai had vanished without a trace, as long as no one could find him, no one would ever know the truth about what had happened to their squad.
Yang Mufeng, who had followed them inside, casually said, “Then who could have hidden the backpack? Don’t tell me it was a zombie.”
Lu Xiaowu had never even considered that possibility. “Come on. What would zombies want with our backpacks? Zombies only like eating people.”
Yang Mufeng packed up some useful seasonings and dry food from the restaurant and scratched his head. “Then are we taking these two backpacks?”
“Of course we’re taking them! Who cares who put them here? Since we’ve found them, they’re ours now. There’s even Lao Gan Ma inside. When I get back, I’m going to eat it with roasted sweet potatoes.” Lu Xiaowu slung one backpack in front and another on his back, then stuffed more than a dozen packets of white sugar into every available corner.
White sugar had a shelf life of up to thirty-six months, provided a large amount of energy, and was even the primary raw material for producing ethanol. To them, white sugar was one of the best life-saving supplies in the apocalypse, and the more they could store, the better.
Even if they had not obtained those gleaming crystal cores on this trip, getting this much sugar alone would have made the journey worthwhile.
“That’s enough. Prepare to retreat.” Zhou Jinshi waved his hand and no longer dwelled on the issue of who had hidden the backpacks there.
Bringing the entire team here and taking them all back safely was the most important thing to him right now.
Moreover, there was still another team waiting for them on a boat out on Lake Yanhu.
…
Li Qiu had no idea how long she had been asleep while leaning against Li Dong.
The underground sewer was cold and damp, and strange sounds could occasionally be heard. Yet Li Qiu had slept soundly.
She woke up for only one reason, she was hungry!
When Li Dong saw Li Qiu move and begin making sounds, his eyes moved as well, and then he stared at her without blinking.
“I’m so hungry. Are you hungry?” Li Qiu swallowed as she looked at Li Dong.
“I… am… hungry…” Li Dong mumbled and muttered, slowly and laboriously imitating Li Qiu’s pronunciation.
Li Qiu did not understand a word of his mumbling and assumed he was growling like usual, so she immediately covered his mouth. “Don’t howl yet. Let me listen for any sounds.”
Li Qiu tugged on Li Dong and made him squat down, then stepped onto his shoulders and listened carefully to the sounds outside.
“It seems like there’s no noise anymore?” Li Qiu widened her eyes and even tugged at her ears. “I can’t have heard wrong, can I?”
She was extremely suspicious now. “Do you think they already killed all our fellow zombies, and if we go out now we’ll be serving ourselves up on a platter?”
“Serve… platter…” Li Dong was still learning to speak, though he remained terrible at it. After finally catching the last two words, what he said was still incomprehensible to Li Qiu.
“No, I’m really hungry. I think they’ve already left. I’ll take you to the entrance so we can sniff around.” Li Qiu rubbed her stomach and muttered to herself at first, but the last sentence was directed at Li Dong.
As hunger set in, the strength in her body began slowly fading again. Her legs even felt as heavy as lead. But the distance from this iron door to the opening they had jumped down from was still very, very, very far away.
The distance was no less than when Li Qiu had huffed and puffed behind her parents and relatives during Qingming Festival, climbing several mountains before finally reaching the ancestral graves.
A faint smile appeared on Li Qiu’s face. “I need to fill my stomach!”
“When Li Qiu smiles, life and death become unpredictable.”
After struggling for a long time, Li Qiu finally stepped on a rat’s tail.
She did not know whether this fat rat was the same one she had seen earlier, but it was just as plump. The entire rat was almost as large as her arm, and its tail was as thick as her thumb, as though it had been inflated.
Stepping on the rat was one thing. How to kill it was another problem.
Before the apocalypse, the most Li Qiu had ever done without changing expression was step on a whole family of cockroaches. Asking her to kill such a huge fat rat was still somewhat beyond her.
Yes, you can’t bring yourself to kill it, but you can bring yourself to eat it.
It was as though a tiny person had appeared in her mind and was mercilessly mocking her.
While Li Qiu was still battling herself mentally, the rat beneath her foot seemed to sense an opportunity and struggled to escape, but it quickly lost that chance.
A hand directly twisted its head off.
“Eat.” Li Dong picked the rat up from the ground and held it out to Li Qiu.
Li Qiu froze for a long time. She blinked several times before finally recovering. What had just happened???
Even more shocking than Li Dong helping her kill a rat to eat was the fact that she had understood the word he had just spoken.
As Li Qiu wolfed down the rat meat, she glanced sideways at Li Dong. She secretly thought that this guy must be the top student among zombies. Not only did he evolve quickly, he also learned things quickly. Previously he had only been learning facial expressions, and now he could already speak.
At this rate, becoming human again would be just around the corner.
I’m his teacher, which means I’m even more amazing. Li Qiu comforted herself inwardly.
While Li Qiu was not paying attention, Li Dong killed three more rats in the shadows. His attacks were fast, accurate, and ruthless. The rats did not even have time to squeak before being sent off to reincarnation. The rats probably never imagined that one day a natural enemy would appear in the sewers.
“That’s enough, that’s enough.” Li Qiu finished all four rats cleanly, wiped her mouth, and her eyes looked far more spirited than before.
Although rat meat could not compare to zombie corpses, much less humans and ability users, it was still natural flesh that had not been processed with all kinds of preservatives. The slight feeling of fullness it provided was enough to let Li Qiu walk to the entrance at a normal speed.
Li Dong slowly followed behind Li Qiu and no longer showed any signs of being attracted by things outside.
It seemed that everything outside really had calmed down. Li Qiu shrank into the shadows beneath the opening and sniffed hard, then listened carefully. There was neither the tempting scent of ability users nor the sounds of fierce explosions and fighting.
She stretched out a finger and pointed at the clutter covering the opening. “We’re going up.”
The two of them had jumped down directly before. A drop of more than two, almost three meters was not enough to injure them. But climbing back up was a bit troublesome.
To her surprise, Li Dong actually knew to crouch halfway down and let Li Qiu step on him to reach the opening. Li Qiu pushed away the clutter covering the entrance, grabbed the edge, and hauled herself up.
The first time she climbed up.
The second time she climbed up.
…
The fifteenth time she climbed up…
“Damn it, I’m exhausted.” Li Qiu had finally climbed out of the opening. At this moment, even if a hundred ability users surrounded her, she would only have enough energy to wait for death.
Fortunately, her intuition had not been wrong. The area around the hotel was pitch black and had fallen into a strange silence.
After catching her breath, Li Qiu looked down into the opening.
Li Dong still maintained the posture of lifting her up. When he saw her looking down, he slowly withdrew his hand and merely raised his head to meet her gaze.
“Don’t rush. Wait for me. I’ll go see if there’s a ladder or a rope.” Li Qiu spoke toward the opening.
Although she was exhausted to death, the thought that her only companion was still down there made her feel that she could still squeeze out a little more strength.
The storeroom might have been underground, so the human ability users had never searched this place. Everything Li Qiu saw remained almost exactly as before, with hardly any changes. Reassured, Li Qiu searched around the storeroom and finally removed two hemp ropes from a box, tied them together with a dead knot, and tossed them down to Li Dong.
To prevent Li Dong from not knowing how to climb, Li Qiu thoughtfully raised her hand and demonstrated the motion of climbing upward hand over hand. “Did you learn it? Grab the rope and I’ll pull you up.”
Li Dong still spoke only in single words. “Learn.” After saying that, he gripped the rope tightly.
“Big brother, as a zombie, you should really lose some weight.” Li Qiu gritted her teeth and squeezed out each word one by one. Her expression was so strained that her features nearly twisted out of place.
After pulling for a long time, there was still no sign of Li Dong being lifted upward. Li Qiu lay at the edge of the opening, gasping for breath with a miserable expression. “I can’t pull anymore. Why don’t you wait while I go eat something first?”
Li Dong said, “Eat.”
“Then just wait here. I’ll come back and get you after I’m full.” Li Qiu weakly waved her hand and practically crawled toward the stairs.
When Li Qiu’s figure disappeared at the stairway entrance, a change came over Li Dong’s eyes. He dropped to all fours and transformed into his crawler form, then leaped straight out from the bottom of the two meter deep pit.
He did not hurry to look for Li Qiu. Instead, he picked up the section of rope that Li Qiu had been pulling on.
Because Li Qiu had been exerting herself with all her strength, the rope had deeply cut into her flesh. It inevitably carried traces of blood from her hands.
Li Dong brought the bloodstains close. It was a scent he could not resist.
Even a tiny amount was enough to make him utterly intoxicated.